Technology gets a bad rap in the old media. In books and films, it is often the machinery used by governments to crush individuality.

In 1984, George Orwell's book about an imagined police state, the Ministry of Love used telescreens to monitor the inhabitants of Oceania: “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.”

In The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film, Gene Hackman played a surveillance expert drawn into a murder plot as he eavesdrops on a young couple. Hackman reappeared in Enemy of the State, a 1998 film about a rogue circle of government agents using satellites and phone-monitoring software to hunt down and kill people.